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Lot Essay
Dating from 1960, the present work was painted while Hockney was studying as a post-graduate student at the Royal College of Art, where his fellow students included Derek Boshier, Allen Jones, R.B. Kitaj and Peter Phillips. Although initially Hockney had focused on purely abstract paintings, excecuted on 3 x 4 feet hardboard, influenced by American abstract expressionism, he soon moved on to incorporating writing in his works.
Marco Livingstone comments, 'Hockney found in words a way of communicating specific messages without confronting the dilemma of illusionism. The idea was suggested to him by Cubist pictures in which words were written on the canvas as a substitute for, or as a clue to the identity of, objects and environments that would otherwise be difficult to decifer. It is a way of bringing in the rest of the world while maintaining the literal identity of all the marks on the canvas; a picture of something is not the thing itself, whereas a word, while alluding to another level of experience, retains the same form whether it is written on a sheet of paper or transcribed on to the surface of a painting' (David Hockney, London, 1981, pp. 18-9).
The present work includes the word 'love' and is close in composition to Hockney's The Third Love Painting, 1960 (Tate, London). Hockney comments, 'A love painting is much more specific; it has many meanings, there are lots of ways you can read the title. But the painting itself is just an abstraction. It's very close to abstract expressionism, in a way; there are one or two shapes that rather dominate it and can be interpreted in, I suppose, an ordinary way. But you are forced to look at the painting quite closely because it is covered with lots of grafitti, which makes you go up to it. You want to read it. I assume people are always inquisitive and nosy, and if you see a little poem written in the corner of a painting it will force you to go up and look at it. And so then the painting becomes something a little different; it's not just, as Whistler would say, an arrangement in browns, pinks and blacks. At the same time, when you see the painting you can see it's not totally preoccupied with content because the paint itself is rather interesting, it's got rather quick heavy impasto painting areas and just as technique it's quite important' (see N. Stangos (ed.), David Hockney by David Hockney, London, 1976, p. 44).
The present work was orginally commissioned to be installed on the Canberra, launched in 1960, for which Hockney painted the walls of the 'Pop Inn' (fig. 1).
Marco Livingstone comments, 'Hockney found in words a way of communicating specific messages without confronting the dilemma of illusionism. The idea was suggested to him by Cubist pictures in which words were written on the canvas as a substitute for, or as a clue to the identity of, objects and environments that would otherwise be difficult to decifer. It is a way of bringing in the rest of the world while maintaining the literal identity of all the marks on the canvas; a picture of something is not the thing itself, whereas a word, while alluding to another level of experience, retains the same form whether it is written on a sheet of paper or transcribed on to the surface of a painting' (David Hockney, London, 1981, pp. 18-9).
The present work includes the word 'love' and is close in composition to Hockney's The Third Love Painting, 1960 (Tate, London). Hockney comments, 'A love painting is much more specific; it has many meanings, there are lots of ways you can read the title. But the painting itself is just an abstraction. It's very close to abstract expressionism, in a way; there are one or two shapes that rather dominate it and can be interpreted in, I suppose, an ordinary way. But you are forced to look at the painting quite closely because it is covered with lots of grafitti, which makes you go up to it. You want to read it. I assume people are always inquisitive and nosy, and if you see a little poem written in the corner of a painting it will force you to go up and look at it. And so then the painting becomes something a little different; it's not just, as Whistler would say, an arrangement in browns, pinks and blacks. At the same time, when you see the painting you can see it's not totally preoccupied with content because the paint itself is rather interesting, it's got rather quick heavy impasto painting areas and just as technique it's quite important' (see N. Stangos (ed.), David Hockney by David Hockney, London, 1976, p. 44).
The present work was orginally commissioned to be installed on the Canberra, launched in 1960, for which Hockney painted the walls of the 'Pop Inn' (fig. 1).